Podcast about Team Cognitive Load and Fast Flow BCN Meetup

What a week! I want to share with you a couple of things that I’m proud of 😄

Team Cognitive Load as a metric to evolve your teams (Spanish)

I had the pleasure to share my experience on how I leveraged the team cognitive load metric to make informed decisions and understand its long-term consequences at the Hablando de Software podcast.

https://www.thoughtworks.com/es-es/insights/podcasts/hablando-software/carga-cognitiva-como-metrica-para-evolucionar-tus-equipos

During the podcast, I share multiple turning points within the organization that impacted the team cognitive load, some decisions increased it and others decreased it, and how we leveraged it to make sensible decisions that would improve team experience and impact the business.

I would summarize the podcast interview as:

• My experience and how I discovered Team Topologies.

• Why I wanted to see the long term impact of my decisions.

• Why creating a full stack team helped reduce the lead time and how we kept team cognitive load in a reasonable level.

• How merging teams, adding people, people leaving, and letting people go (leadership and individual contributors) impacts the team cognitive load and physiological safety, and what it takes to recover from that.

• How increasing the team boundary and responsibility increased their cognitive load at delivery level but decreased at communication level, causing an improve of ownership and autonomy. Decision driven by:

  • Team cognitive load.

  • Team Topologies to signal long term communication anti-patterns

  • DDD to understand the bounded context and align it to the desired socio-technical architecture.

• How to support a team with a big bounded context that provides customer services via a mobile application, a web portal to businesses, and keep evolving the product at good velocity by providing 3 platforms experience to reduce unnecessary cognitive load on:

  • Push and Run Platform (CI/CD pipelines, roll out strategies, testing, build docker images, observability, …)

  • Mobile platform (Component library, templates, monitoring, …)

  • Tribe platform (key business use cases that needed stable experience to build fast moving products on top of).

You can know more about this journey on my open engineering strategy post series 👇

A legacy, a deadline, and no team.

I will write about the team cognitive load and how to make informed decisions in more detail soon or, even better, why not speak about this topic in a English-speaking podcast?! If you have a Podcast in English that this topic could fit in the theme, you can contact me via my personal web page or via LinkedIn.

You can listen the podcast in Spanish here 👇

Fast Flow BCN - What's preventing flow in your organizations

Alvaro, a good friend of mine, and I have been sharing which has been our challenges to introduce change within our organizations. Sharing our pains helped us in two ways:

1. Don’t feel alone.

2. Verify our assumptions and gather new ideas that could work on our context.

We wanted to see if more people found it valuable and if we were able to create an space to be vulnerable and share that we are struggling and we need help.

I recall a super good experience I had on May 2023 at FastFlowConf. People shared super deep insights on their experiences to achieve complicated initiatives and overcome friction and inertia.

I loved that. I felt that I learned from a lot of people and I was able to empathize with their experience and pain.

Then, I saw Fast Flow Netherlands emerging and gaining traction and we thought, why not starting Fast Flow BCN?

And here we are! 🙌

And… just imagine that you start a meetup, and the first speaker is Manuel Pais, Co-Author of Team Topologies. Could you ever think about a better start?

Fast Flow BCN Meetup

We wanted to create the space to have debates, share our experiences, and create a sense of everyone else is struggling, it isn’t only me.

It is the reason why we started with a bold intention.

• 20min talk

• 1h of a fish bowl.

Fishbowl Conversation is great for keeping a focused conversation when you have a large group of people.

Fast Flow - Blockers & Pitfalls

Manuel’s talk slides

I enjoyed this talk/rant that:

1. Clarified some concepts on the book and how it evolved since the book has been published.

2. Misinterpretations/anti-patterns that people had that prevents flow.

   1. I felt identified on several of those examples on different experiences I had on the past. It was awesome to find a collection of anti-pattern, and which would be the approach to overcome the challenge.

You can see the slides here.

Fish bowl

A fish bowl is a strong bet, because you rely on the people that joins the panel to lead the conversation and the topic. And it went way better than expected.

Multiple people shared their pains on:

• How to get buy-in from leadership to make the right decisions.

• When people do the easy decision, not the right decision.

• How cognitive load impacts fast flow on the decision making.

• How flow at team level works, but then cross-team initiatives are needed and the approach to implement being top-down.

• How to enable an expansion on multiple locations that before took months.

• How to invest on breaking a monolith when leadership don’t understand the pains.

The problem/solution is people

A key aspect on the whole conversation was that we all acknowledge that what’s preventing flow within the organization is people.

BUT, people don’t prevent flow intentionally. We need to deeply understand, connect and empathize with other people, either team mates, leadership team, or the people that we manage, to help change to flow.

I enjoyed that some conversations started as technical problems, and we moved to people problems fast enough to share tips and experiences on how people achieved moving from a monolith to a fast flow organization.

The Amazon Prime example

I recall this example from Henrique, an ex-college from ThoughtWorks, using Amazon Prime. It really made me think about the situation. He shared the next situation.

Imagine you are Amazon, before having Amazon Prime. You have the checkout team, category team, product view team, order team, order delivery team, each taking a value stream… And suddenly, you detect a huge opportunity as it is Amazon Prime.
Prime impacts all the teams.
How do make this initiative that requires multiple team collaboration without being a top-down with huge coordination?
There are things that can emerge at team level (bottom up), but there are things that happen top-down.
So, how this initiative can be done as a new value stream without implying a re-org for example?

Good question Henrique! I have to spend some time thinking about it 😄

Question for you as a reader, how would you introduce an initiative that’s cross team?